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These are the replies to critics on my book Pragmatism and the wide view of democracy.

This article defends an analytical framework based on systems theory, reflexive law, and Teubner’s regulatory trilemma. J v B exemplifies the numerous overlapping social relations, and forms a case study on the relationship between the State, community, and minority religious individuals, and on how this relationship can break down from the systems theoretical perspective. The article uses this case as a testing ground for a modified systems theoretical approach, treating this conflict between family law and religion as a regulatory problem. Although it centers on English family law, the article should be read as a piece of normative legal theory of general application. In the final section, it explores reflexive secularity and how this may apply in cases where law and religion interact, such as J v B.

What is dialectic and what is it for, in Aristotle? Aristotle’s answer in Topics 1.2 seems surprisingly lacking in unity. He seems to imply that insofar as dialectic is an expertise (τέχνη), it is a disposition to three (possibly four) different kinds of productive achievement. Insofar as dialectic is a method, it is one whose use is seemingly subject to multiple, differing standards of evaluation. The goal of the paper is to resist this problematic “multi-tool” view of Aristotelian dialectic, by explaining how dialectic’s contributions to training, encounters, and the philosophical sciences are of the same kind. What unifies them, I argue, is the kind of reasoning that improves the epistemic position of the person that engages with it. The kind of reasoning-based practices in which dialectic is the expertise are, at heart, tools of inquiry, tools for improving people’s understanding. This is why dialectic is beneficial for persuasive encounters: it is an expertise that enables its possessor to persuade by improving the understanding of their participants.

These responses are replies to the contributions to a book symposium devoted to my book Knowing and Seeing. Groundwork for a New Empiricism (2019), held at the University of Vienna in February 2020.

The author raises a puzzle about the compatibility of the two features which, according to Ayers, jointly characterize paradigmatic cases of seeing, viz. ‘perspicuity’ and ‘immediacy’. In Section 1, the author explains why Ayers’s explanation of these two features suggests an inconsistent combination of reflexivity and realism about sense experience. Some of Ayers’s comments about our awareness of causation suggest a way of giving up on reflexivity. In Section 2, the author uses a thought-experiment to support the view that realism rather than reflexivity ought to be given up. In Section 3, the author gives a further reason for Ayers to take this option: it furnishes a response to a troublesome challenge concerning the epistemic significance of consciousness, a challenge which Ayers himself anticipates at the end of Chapter 2 of Knowing and Seeing but does not fully resolve.

This is a discussion note on Michael Ayers’ Knowing and Seeing. Groundwork for a New Empiricism.

In the 2020 Thailand’s protests, the spirit of democracy humiliated over the past six years has been restored. Like a wave of the never-failing stream, Thai people, including myself young and old, demanded a change in Thai politics.

In The Practice of Political Theory, Clayton Chin puts Richard Rorty’s pragmatism in dialogue with a range of contemporary political theorists, particularly focusing on how his notion of cultural politics can speak to the ontological turn in political theory. This article focuses on Chin’s claim that Rorty’s cultural politics provides an ethos of inclusive and tolerant political engagement. After exploring the basis for Chin’s interpretation, it identifies three tensions in this ethos, in relation to character of its demandingness, the fissure between ethnocentric and egalitarian engagement, and the relationship of this ethos to the virtues and procedures of democratic citizenship.

This paper concerns the way that phenomenal consciousness helps us to know things about the world. Most discussions of how consciousness contributes to our store of knowledge focus on propositional knowledge. In this paper, I recast the problem in terms of practical knowledge by reconstructing some neglected strands of argument in William James’s analyses of bodily affect and habitual action in The Principles of Psychology (1890/1950). I will argue that my reading of James’s view provides a plausible account of how phenomenally conscious states feed practical knowledge. I will also show that my reconstruction of James view harmonizes well with recent empirical findings.

Luigi Bonanate’s book “Costituzione italiana: articolo 11” analyses Article 11 of the Italian Constitution through the prism of its application. Bonanate provides the reader, in a clear and compelling style, with a complete interpretation of Article 11, combining the analysis of the preparatory work in the Constituent Assembly with its doctrinal interpretation and political application. The book does not only analyse the drafting of this article, but also focuses on the “political history of Article 11”, on the contemporary debate by the scientific community and, finally, on its relations with the international legal system.

The present study addressed two related problems: The status of the concept of the soul in folk psychological conceptualizations across cultures, and the nature of mind-body dualism within Chinese folk psychology. We compared folk intuitions about three concepts – mind, body, and soul – among adults from China (N=257) and Poland (N=225). The questionnaire study comprised of questions about the functional and ontological nature of the three entities. The results show that the mind and soul are conceptualized differently in the two countries: The Chinese appear to think of the soul similarly to how they view the mind (importantly, they still seem to see it as separate from the body), while Poles differentiate it both in ontological and functional respects. The study provides important insights into cross-cultural differences in conceptualizing the soul as well as into the nature of Chinese mind-body dualism.

This paper examines some neglected Chrysippean fragments on insecure apprehension (κατάληψις). First, I present Chrysippus’ account of how non-Sages can begin to fortify their insecure apprehension and upgrade it into knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). Next, I reconstruct Chrysippus’ explanation of how sophisms and counter-arguments lead one to abandon one’s insecure apprehension. One such counter-argument originates in the sceptical Academy and targets the Stoic claim that insecure apprehension can be acquired on the basis of custom (συνήθεια). I show how Chrysippus could defend the possibility of custom-based apprehension, while also denying that there is custom-based knowledge.

Knafo and Teschke’s surprisingly polemical critique of Brenner’s work is derived from earlier work which applies the same critique arising out of the agency/structure debate in International Relations theory. Casting Brenner’s work as increasingly structuralist over time and therefore increasingly prone to reify social relations, thereby suppressing or downplaying the role of agency, Knafo and Teschke ask their readers to take such claims at face value, offering no close textual reading of Brenner’s work. Focusing almost entirely on method rather than on substance and by framing their critique within the confines of the unending debate over structure and agency, Knafo and Teschke’s claim that Brenner’s work consistently reifies social relations – presuming but not demonstrating that this is his intent – obscures and fails to engage substantively with his powerful historical contributions, or to offer alternative definitions or historical theories.

Both Buddhist meditation and micro-phenomenology start from the observation that our experience escapes us, we don’t see it as it is. Both offer devices that allow us to become aware of it. But, surprisingly, the two approaches offer few precise descriptions of the processes which veil experience, and of those which make it possible to dissipate these veils. This article is an attempt to put in parentheses declarative writings on the veiling and unveiling processes and their epistemological background and to collect procedural descriptions of this veiling and unveiling processes. From written and oral meditation teachings on the one hand, micro-phenomenological interviews applied to meditative experience and to themselves on the other hand, we identified four types of veiling processes which contribute to screen what is there, and ultimately to generate the naïve belief in the existence of an external reality independent of the mind: attentional, emotional, intentional and cognitive veils. The first part of the article describes these veiling processes and the processes through which they dissipate. It leads to the identification of several “gestures” conducive to this unveiling. The second part describes the devices used by meditation and by micro-phenomenology to elicit these gestures.

In this study, I attempt to propose a conceptualisation of interactive politeness which is anchored in the investigation of a kind of other-criticism known as ‘eršâd šodan’ or being exposed to verbal guidance, which is an important religious value among Muslims. The concept of ‘eršâd šodan’ has an imperative load that is expected to contribute to negative impoliteness (Culpeper, 2016). However, as the data of this study reveal, threatening individuals’ negative face through other-criticism was not interpreted as impoliteness among the subjects. My analysis through one-on-one interviews indicates that politeness among Persian speakers is more than a dynamic construction between conversational partners, for there are macro orders that influence people’s interpretation of politeness. I conclude that politeness in other-criticism is closely germane to how subjects connected imposition to the establishment of orders. This article intends to show that it is reasonable to expect that the criticism of an individual could be for the individual’s own good but also for the greater (group, community) good, reminiscent of cultural facilities that are provided to fulfil the certain interests of a particular community.

This article questions a longtime credo concerning Plato’s Laws, namely that the three choruses introduced in Book 2 are institutions of the dialogue’s political project. A detailed analysis of relevant passages shows that the evidence is insufficent. Rather, it is argued, this part of Book 2 is essentially plurivalent: on three separate semantic layers, the choruses illustrate political, moral-psychological and key educational issues of the Laws. Apart from explaining the disappearance of the choruses after Book 2, the proposed reading aims to bring to light an impressively artful philosophical and literary strategy of Plato’s.

As a rising star on the international stage, city diplomacy has been examined by practitioners and pioneer scholars. Therefore, structured insights from practice, history, and academic works have boosted theory development. Similarly, new diplomatic history can explore new paths based on contemporary perspectives on city diplomacy. Based on a practitioner’s perspective, this essay brings academically contextualized observations together for the construction of a conceptual framework for the historical study of city diplomacy.

Sextus Empiricus’ definition of skepticism as a search for truth still poses great problems for research today. Perhaps the most urgent of these is: How can we reasonably assert the possibility of knowledge and at the same time deny its reality? The paper tries to solve this question by drawing attention to a hitherto neglected variant of skepticism: the so-called critical skepticism. In confrontation with Hume and Kant, Salomon Maimon develops a skeptical position which, with the help of transcendental argumentation, produces a knowing of not-knowing. Maimon defends with Kant (and against Hume) transcendental knowledge which at the same time offers a reason to reject with Hume and against Kant empirical knowledge. By doing so, he distinguishes a knowledge of possibility from a (non-)knowledge of reality, whereby the search for truth—expressed in the assumption that knowledge is possible—is and remains the only truth.

Extant criticism of crime and mystery fiction has indicated how protagonists have freedom of choice in dealing with difficult situations in different forms of risky or challenging settings. In this article, previous criticism is evaluated in terms of its reflection of an essential element of the human condition: the Self’s free will to construct the existential and spatial meanings of its phenomenological existence in relation to the Other. The article further indicates that protagonists tend to disregard their freedom and responsibility for their actions, especially when they make existential choices in traumatic or critical situations. Additionally, the dominance of others and variously suppressive spatial contexts can inhibit the protagonists from acknowledging their free will to act responsibly in order to reach their authentic existence. This article integrates Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of the human condition and the corresponding interpretative framework of spatial concepts from different thinkers, such as Edward Relph, Arnold van Gennep, Victor W. Turner and Mikhail M. Bakhtin, who emphasize the significance of places in the meaning-construction of the Self’s identity and its existence in relation to the Other. Through the integration of these theoretical frameworks, the portrayal of protagonists in contemporary crime and mystery novels is examined in order to illustrate individuals’ senses of freedom and responsibility for their own actions in existential and spatial contexts.

In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell presents a justification of induction based on a principle he refers to as “the principle of induction.” Owing to the ambiguity of the notion of probability, the principle of induction may be interpreted in two different ways. If interpreted in terms of the subjective interpretation of probability, the principle of induction may be known a priori to be true. But it is unclear how this should give us any confidence in our use of induction, since induction is applied to the external world outside our minds. If the principle is interpreted in light of the objective interpretation of induction, it cannot be known to be true a priori, since it applies to frequencies that occur in the world outside the mind, and these cannot be known without recourse to experience. Russell’s principle of induction therefore fails to provide a satisfactory justification of induction.

This article examines Roman-era oaths invoking nondeities, especially persons. It argues that rather than invoking quasi-deities or persons to be punished by the gods in case of perjury, as usually understood in the past, these invocations could have two concurrent functions: honoring the invoked persons and affirming a statement. Though such invocations had limited legal power, they were commonly practiced throughout the period, as demonstrated in various textual genres, including Latin poetry and rhetoric, texts of the Second Sophistic, Jewish rabbinical writings, and 5th-century Christian sermons. Furthermore, nondivine invocations were frequently combined and mingled with divine invocations, with only theologically inclined authors attempting to define them clearly as a separate category. This interpretation has significance for understanding some equivocal oaths, such as the oath by the emperor, as well as for our perception of oaths in general as a speech act with functions going beyond the affirmation of a statement.

Rorty holds that it is possible to defend a liberal democratic policy without having to substantiate it according to universal criteria linked to corresponding notions of truth, instead, he affirms that this democratic policy can be founded on a notion of truth narrowly linked to justification. Following this idea one would expect Rorty to take a position committed to pluralism understood in a strong sense, where different positions are justified and validated in relation to specific existential conditions, however, this does not happen. As we will demonstrate, Rorty´s proposal, although it is partly inspired by Nietzsche´s perspectivism, as well as the ethical-political reading of plurality based on Wittgenstein´s proposal of language games, it goes no further than a contextualized pretence which is not based on a real posture of pluralism. In this article we maintain that the Rortian position, far from being pluralist, tends toward ethno-centrism and even domination through persuasion.

In response to challenges to moral philosophy presented by other disciplines and facing a diversity of approaches to the foundation and focus of morality, this paper argues for a pluralist meta-ethics that is methodologically hierarchical and guided by the principle of subsidiarity. Inspired by Deweyan pragmatism, this novel and original application of the subsidiarity principle and the related methodological proposal for a cascading meta-ethical architecture offer a “dirty” and instrumentalist understanding of meta-ethics that promises to work, not only in moral philosophy but also in the (rest of the) real world, and that facilitates collaboration with other disciplines outside moral philosophy.

Charles Sanders Peirce offers a number of arguments against the rational application of theory to morality, suggesting instead that morality should be grounded in instinct. Peirce maintains that we currently lack the scientific knowledge that would justify a rational structuring of morality. This being the case, philosophically generated moralities cannot be otherwise than dogmatic and dangerous. In this paper, I contend that Peirce’s critique of what I call “dogmatic-philosophical morality” should be taken very seriously, but I also claim that the purely instinctive morality Peirce endorses is liable to a danger of its own, namely fanaticism. Indeed, Peirce himself recognizes this danger. As an alternative, I sketch a form of “pragmatic morality” that attempts to sidestep the dogmatism of philosophical morality and the fanaticism of instinctive morality. This form of morality avoids philosophical dogmatism by treating extant instincts as the postulates and materials with which it works. It avoids instinctive fanaticism by allowing a role to reason. By exhibiting fallibilism, revisability, pluralism, and meliorism, this type of reasoning can avoid the dogmatism of the philosophical kind of morality Peirce critiques.

This essay addresses what we can call epistemology’s Prime Evils. These are the three demons epistemologists have conjured that are the most troublesome and the most difficult to dispel: Descartes’ classic demon; Lehrer and Cohen’s New Evil Demon; and Schaffer’s Debasing Demon. These demons threaten the epistemic statuses of our beliefs—in particular, the statuses of knowledge and justification—and they present challenges for our theories of these epistemic statuses. This paper explains the key features of these three central demons, highlights their family resemblances and differences, and attempts to show that a certain kind of internalist view of justification provides the resources to handle these demons well.

This article is to argue that virtue is experienced and understood in Confucian ethics as power to act and as performance of a moral action, and that virtue (de 德) as such has to be onto-cosmologically explicated, not just teleologically explained. In other words, it is intended to construct an integrative theory of virtues based on both dao (the Way 道) and de. To do so, we will examine the two features of de, as the power that is derived from self-reflection and self-restraining, and as the motivated action for attaining its practical end in a community. Only by a self-integrated moral consciousness can one’s experience, action and ideal remain in consistency and coherence, which leads us to the Aristotelian notion of virtue as excellence (aretê) and enables us to see how virtue as aretê could be introduced as a second feature of de, namely as the power for effective action in the whole system of virtues, apart from the first feature of de as self-restraining power. We will conclude that reason and virtue are practically united and remain inseparable, and that taking into account the onto-cosmological foundation of virtues, reason and virtue are inevitably the moving and advancing forces for the formation and transformation of human morality just as they are motivating and prompting incentives for individual moral action.

This paper argues that we should reject G. E. Moore’s anti-skeptical argument as it is presented in “Proof of an External World.” However, the reason I offer is different from traditional objections. A proper understanding of Moore’s “proof” requires paying attention to an important distinction between two forms of skepticism. I call these Ontological Skepticism and Epistemic Skepticism. The former is skepticism about the ontological status of fundamental reality, while the latter is skepticism about our empirical knowledge. Philosophers often assume that Moore’s response to “external world skepticism” deals exclusively with the former, not the latter. But this is a mistake. I shall argue that Moore’s anti-skeptical argument targets an ontological form of skepticism. Thus, the conclusion is an ontological claim about fundamental reality, while the premises are epistemic claims. If this is correct, then the conclusion outstrips the scope of its premises and proves too much.

At the end of the Meno, Socrates suggests that genuine virtue is knowledge. This is surprising because he has recently concluded that virtue is (mere) true opinion. I show that Socrates’ new position is motivated by two commitments. First, that being virtuous requires being responsible for the correctness of one’s actions. Second, that only a knower has this kind of ownership of action. An implication of my argument is that, despite his emphasis on virtuous action in the Meno, Socrates endorses an agent-centred ethics. He thinks the epistemic status of the agent is essential to the assessment of her goodness.

We can find in Henry David Thoreau’s work a response to Cartesian skepticism. Thoreau takes this skepticism to get its start in us only when we are not attuned to the world, that is, only when we lose sight of our being integrated with the world in the way we quite naturally are. Thoreau posits for human beings a natural and unshakeable integration with the world. This develops into an attunement with the world, making us ready to engage with the world as mature epistemic agents. Yet even if we fall out of attunement with the world, perhaps in response to the reasonableness of a comprehensive doubt, our natural integration with the world remains. Skepticism lacks force because we are integrated with the world even when we are not attuned to it, and because our integration with the world can always help us return to a healthy epistemic engagement with the world.

The paradox of hedonism is the idea that intrinsically desiring nothing other than pleasure can prevent one from obtaining pleasure. In this article, I show how the paradox of hedonism can be used as the basis for an objection against hedonism about well-being, and one that is more defensible than has been commonly recognized. Moreover, I argue that the challenge presented by the paradox can be used to target not only hedonism about well-being, but also desire satisfactionism and the hybrid theory. However, I argue that certain sophisticated versions of all three theories can escape it.

Contemporary Islamic legal studies – both inside and outside the Muslim world – commonly relies upon a secular distortion of law. In this article, I use translation as a metonym for secular transformations and, accordingly, I will demonstrate how secular ideology translates the Islamic tradition. A secular translation converts the Islamic tradition into “religion” (the non-secular) and Islamic law into “sharia” – a term intended to represent the English mispronunciation of the Arabic word شريعة (sharīʿah). I explore the differences between historical Islamic terms and secular terms in order to demonstrate that coloniality generates religion and religious law; in turn, these two notions convert شريعة (sharīʿah) into “sharia” in both Arabic and non-Arabic languages. Consequently, the notion of “sharia” is part of a colonial system of meaning.

Francis Bacon shared with many vitalists a belief in the radiative nature of bodies. Bacon’s bodies emit material effluvia, species and virtues, and various forms of spiritual matter; they exchange heat and cold with the surrounding media, they expand in a “larger sphere,” and they receive (and are modified by) celestial radiations. Meanwhile, Bacon also believed that each of these actions and virtues has a specific range of action, its own “orb of virtue” (Jalobeanu 2016a). Thus, a large part of Bacon’s concrete and abstract physics is concerned with finding experimental strategies for determining the natural limits, borders and orbs of virtue in this radiative universe (Jalobeanu 2016b). In this paper, I reconstruct the preliminary steps of Bacon’s inquiry into these natural limits, and “measures of space,” by devising instruments “subtle enough” to be able to perform such an inquiry. I show that the development of such instruments was made possible by a remarkable conceptual innovation: the operationalization of the traditional natural philosophical concept of “perception.” Bacon’s definition of “perception” in terms of “orb of virtue” vindicated the use of instruments and provided his top-down project of measuring Nature with the means to take off the ground.

This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production essentially anchored in the Western and Eastern Late Antique traditions that have inspired it. It argues instead that the Umayyads brought about an aesthetic revolution laying out the foundations of what has become known as “Islamic ornament,” a predominantly aniconic art form. An epistemological shift from art history to critical inquiry allows us to show that, beyond the adaptive borrowing of pre-existing forms, the Umayyads redefined the art’s condition of meaning based on an unprecedented attitude to images and visual discourse informed by Islamic ontotheology and logocentric metaphysics.

In the field of world literature, questions about the temporal versus spatial nature of worlding persist. One reason is the problematic nature of this dichotomy. Taking up Pheng Cheah’s calls for the temporal worlding of indeterminate becoming, my paper complicates the fate of spatiality in this move toward ontological open-endedness. With discussion of the vanishing point, I postulate that imaginative distancing in its relation to memory involves a spatialization that need not be circumscribed by global flattening of the humanist ethos central to the worldliness of world literature. In response to the connection Cheah draws between literature and worldliness, I claim that the latter is characterized by a spatiotemporal elasticity born from the proliferation of meaning in the former. At the extreme, this movement gestures toward the infinite held by the vanishing point, and there, indeterminacy appears absurdly paradoxical in our search for world value, as consciousness loses itself in the repeated and necessary attempt to transcend distance that cannot be measured.

Recent research in the field of New Institutionalist analysis has developed the view that institutions are grounded not only upon authoritative rules but also upon accepted practices and narratives. In this paper I am interested in the ways in which honorific practices and accounts of identity set out in ancient Greek inscriptions contribute towards the persistence of polis institutions in the Hellenistic period. A diachronic survey of Erythraian inscriptions of the classical and Hellenistic periods gives an impression of the adaptation and proliferation of forms of discourse established in the classical period. It demonstrates the ongoing prominence of the rhetoric of identity in conversations that went on not only between peer polities and within real or imagined kinship groups but also in negotiations between powerful and weak state entities and in inward-facing discourses on euergetism.

Historians of emotion largely agree that their research can be usefully informed by interdisciplinary engagement with disciplines like psychology and neuroscience. There is, however, an immediate barrier to such interdisciplinary work: researchers in the affective sciences largely believe that human emotions are meaningfully universal, while historians of emotion overwhelmingly reject the concept of emotional universality. The current essay argues that, despite this fundamental difference, it is still possible for historians of emotion to learn from universalist affective science. This can be done, I suggest, by taking a cue from Klaus Scherer’s concept of ‘modal emotions’, which provides a roadmap for how historians of emotion might make a strategic compromise with universalist science – one that would allow them to access a much wider pool of interdisciplinary opportunity, but would not require them to sacrifice their anti-universalist beliefs. My paper proposes that emotion history will be better served by expanding the scope of its interdisciplinary borrowings, and offers a model for how this might be responsibly done.

The paper focuses on the pragmatist image of humanity based on a re-reading of the philosophical “manifesto” of Wilfrid Sellars (1963) in which he became entangled in the dichotomy between “scientific” and “manifest” images. The key to solving this problem, according to the author, is the new pragmatist understanding of science as a cultural practice, which provide us with a new framework for transcending this dichotomy. By reconstructing Sellars in an anthropological rather than a scientistic way and by drawing on humanistic philosophical intentions that are present both in pragmatism and in Sellars, it becomes possible to outline a concept of “science with a human face.” The purpose of all kinds of images, including scientific ones, is to serve the enrichment of human understanding and life.

Peter Zinkernagel and David Favrholdt: A Response to George Berkeley in Twentieth-Century Danish PhilosophyThe purpose of this essay is to elucidate some aspects of the theoretical philosophy developed by Peter Zinkernagel (1921-2003) and David Favrholdt (1931-2012), and of their response to George Berkeley’s philosophy in The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). My particular aim is to present what I consider as Zinkernagel’s and Favrholdt’s most important philosophical contribution; namely, to distinguish between two different human approaches to reality: the one by action, the other by perception. Their most interesting attempt is to be found in their development and use of that distinction, initially in Zinkernagel’s book Conditions for Description (1957/1962), and culminating in Favrholdt’s development of a new conception of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The two thinkers had very much in common, although Zinkernagel is the initiator. Nevertheless, Favrholdt maintained an emphasis on language and communication, and later on developed this into his own points and stances, although still relying on the same fundamental distinction between action and perception – and on insights borrowed from Niels Bohr.

In this article, the author examines Keith Lehrer’s response to the Consequence Argument. He argues that his response has advantages over David Lewis’s. Contrary to what Lewis suggests in a footnote, Lehrer’s assessment of an ability to affect the laws of nature in deterministic settings is largely the same as Lewis’s. However, Lehrer’s position has an advantage that Lewis’s lacks. Lehrer integrates his proposal within a positive account of freedom, and this helps to explain how it could be that an agent is able to do otherwise in deterministic settings in such a way that if she did, some law of nature would be different.

In this paper I argue that, contrary to what several prominent scholars of On Certainty have claimed, Wittgenstein did not maintain that simple mathematical propositions like “2 × 2 = 4” or “12 × 12 = 144,” much like G. E. Moore’s truisms, could be examples of hinge propositions. In particular, given his overall conception of mathematics, it was impossible for him to single out these simpler mathematical propositions from the rest of mathematical statements, to reserve only to them a normative function. I then maintain that these mathematical examples were introduced merely as objects of comparison to bring out some peculiar features of the only hinges he countenanced in On Certainty, which were all outside the realm of mathematics. I then close by gesturing at how the distinction between mathematical hinges and non-hinges could be exemplified and by exploring its consequences with respect to (Wittgenstein’s) philosophy of mathematics.

In this paper, I am interested in skepticism’s downstream effects on further inquiry. To account for these downstream effects, we need to distinguish (i) the (skepticism-supporting) reasons for doubting whether p, (ii) one’s other background beliefs bearing on the prospects that further inquiry would improve one’s epistemic position on p, and (iii) the value one assigns to determining whether p. I advance two claims regarding skepticism’s downstream effects on inquiry. First, it is characteristic of “radical” forms of skepticism that (i) is sufficient to undermine the prospect described in (ii). By contrast (and second), ordinary forms of skepticism, which can be identified in connection with (ii), can actually be a boon to inquiry by enhancing (iii). In such cases, having reasons for skeptical doubt is not merely compatible with inquiring further, but also serves to motivate and to help frame such inquiry.

The paper examines whether Gorgias’ On What Is Not should be considered an instance of skepticism. It begins with an analysis of the work as reported by the two sources, Sextus Empiricus and the anonymous author of On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias. It is then argued that the Pyrrhonian skeptics did not regard On What Is Not as skeptical. Nonetheless, it is possible to read the work as offering counter-arguments to Parmenides, with a view to inducing suspension of judgment in Pyrrhonian fashion. However, it is also possible to regard it as skeptical in a sense current in modern philosophy: that is, as posing challenges to our understanding of things with a view to forcing philosophers to come up with better theories. In this light, it can be seen as an important stimulus to the philosophical breakthroughs apparent in Plato’s Sophist.

Philosophers defend, and often believe, controversial philosophical claims. Since they aren’t clueless, they are usually aware that their views are controversial—on some occasions, the views are definitely in the minority amongst the relevant specialist-experts. In addition, most philosophers are aware that they are not God’s gift to philosophy, since they admit their ability to track truth in philosophy is not extraordinary compared to that of other philosophers. In this paper I argue that in many real-life cases, such beliefs in controversial claims are irrational. This means that most philosophers have irrational philosophical beliefs.

One of Plato’s central tenets is that we can know forms. In Parmenides 133b4–134b5, Plato presents an argument whose sceptical conclusion is that we can’t know forms. Although he indicates that the argument doesn’t succeed, he also says it’s difficult to explain how it fails. Commentators have suggested a variety of flaws. I argue that the argument can be defended against some, though not all, of the alleged flaws. But I also argue that Plato hints at a crucial distinction that hasn’t been brought to bear in this context, and that indeed he is sometimes thought not to draw: that between the content and object of knowledge. Once we are clear about this distinction, we can see that the sceptical argument doesn’t imply that we can’t know forms.

This paper takes up two questions. Is there a sense in which the Sceptic as described by Sextus Empiricus is detached from himself? Does this self-detachment by itself make the Sceptic’s way of life undesirable? I sketch two conceptions of self-detachment, and then conclude that the Sceptic faces a dilemma: either he is more detached from himself than the non-Sceptic or he is vulnerable to a non-standard version of the apraxia objection.

A long-standing family of worries about moral realism focuses on its implications for moral epistemology. The underlying concern is that if moral truths have the nature that realists believe, it is hard to see how we could know what they are. This objection may be called the “argument from skepticism” against moral realism. Realists have primarily responded to this argument by presenting accounts of how we could acquire knowledge of moral truths that are consistent with realist assumptions about their nature. Less time has been spent, however, on the question of why it would be a problem for moral realism if it leads to skepticism in the first place, and on the related question of which skeptical conclusions it would be problematic for realists to simply accept. This paper considers several answers to these questions, thereby distinguishing a number of versions of the argument from skepticism, and discusses their prospects.

In recent years, notions of space in biblical texts have been analyzed by means of sociological concepts of spatiality, primarily based on the works of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja. This article explores the heuristic provided by spatial concepts for the understanding of Psalm 73 and the debated understanding of the expression “sanctuaries of God” (מִקְדְּשֵׁי־אֵל) in v. 17. The actions described in this psalm take place in social space that is constituted, endangered and renewed by the actions of the psalm’s protagonists.